


jetpack blues (baby, come home)

by AptlyNamed



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asexual Jughead Jones, Character Study, Coping Mechanisms, Getting Together, Headcanon, M/M, One Shot, Unbetaed we die like men, and shit self esteem, but hes not aromantic, like... after the first few episodes, lmao i saw that jug was a writer and angsty and my brain went hewwo?? owo, oh and the whole grundy thing doesn't exist, so... so many headcanons tbh, that aren't supremely healthy, very strongly alluded that jug has depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-07 22:29:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17374415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AptlyNamed/pseuds/AptlyNamed
Summary: Jughead's in love with three things. Food, words, and- well.





	jetpack blues (baby, come home)

**Author's Note:**

> So it takes me approximately 3-4 business years to post anything ever. This was written wayyyy back when Riverdale was just starting out so anything after the first few eps is absolutely thrown out the window.  
> I tried to tag all that I could, but please let me know if anything else needs to be tagged!!  
> Title's from Fall Out Boy

His first love is dictionaries. Food comes after, when he stares out at the sky and feels nothing at all. Maybe love isn't the right word- maybe coping mechanism, maybe medication fits better. But that frees up what the word love means, and if love isn't pages of obscure words on dry paper that crinkles as he turns them, isn't the weight and realness of ice cream melting on his tongue, then-

Well. He doesn't want to finish that thought, so he loves Webster and Cambridge and Pop Tates, nothing more. Has since he was nine, when a teacher sent him to the dictionary for a word. Instead of the actual word he was meant to find- dessert, he thinks- he accidentally discovers the the word desideratum; a cacophony at first in his head before the syllables straighten out. He liked how it settled on his front teeth, and for his ninth birthday he asked for a dictionary. The rest, as they say, is history. (Love is a new way to see an old meaning.)

Here's the catch- Jug needs the words to capture what's crawling under his skin. Food helps cement him, keep him present in reality but writing helps when he is too real, too much conscious of his skin and the turn of the Earth. He keeps dozens of notebooks, filled in in a midnight haze or when the sun peeks over the horizon and he is sick with it or in Biology with the fluorescents trembling on high. There is something too much in him, and his notebooks are where he stores the excess. They are pieces of him, really, that he's let no other soul see.

So of course he loses one.

It's a stupid thing. He's running on three hours of sleep, a cup of coffee and the smell of ink. Stupidly, he doesn't recheck his bag as he goes from period to period, classroom to classroom. He doesn't check, and between first period and last he loses a notebook. He grits his teeth when he realizes, pushes down the panic in his chest, and just barely manages not to stumble-run through the throngs of people to look for it. The halls empty quickly as he goes through his classrooms in reverse order, last period to first. By the time he's checked his third period classroom, the only footsteps in the hallways are his and the janitors. He doesn't sigh, though he desperately wants to, and trudges to his second period class. The music room door only squeaks a little when he shoves his way in. He stops. Faintly, he can hear it squeak closed over the sudden pounding in his ears.

Archie absentmindedly waves at Jug. "This is good, man." Archie compliments as he flips through Jug's fucking _soul_. 

Jug's heart is in his fucking throat and his hands feels cold. He stares blankly at Archie fucking Andrews thumbing through one of his notebooks.

Archie scrunches his face at a page before glancing up to grin at Jug. "Is this a poem? I didn't know you wrote poetry."

Jug remembers the poem in there, the only one he's written with shaking hands. It's about a heart that lies, but lies still for cloudless days and a hand in his. 

'and loud nights are nothing to you, my crescendo, you know the tune and I just turn up the radio,' Archie is mouthing, and that is what pushes panic back into Jug, because this is unbearably close to the lines he cannot let,  _cannot_ _let_ Archie see.

He yanks, and Archie's hands are slack, and please let him have been fast enough, let their tentative renewed friendship be safe from Jug's stupid goddamn aching fingers and shaking pen. 

Arch blinks. Jug is clutching the notebook to his chest, eyes wide and mouth dry, dry, dry.

"Jug," He says slowly. "'orange close to my fingers, orange to burn or-?'"

His chest is a vacuum chamber. His legs feel far, far away. Well, he thinks distantly. That's that.

"Jug?" Archie asks, and Jug has never been good at keeping words inside.

"Yes, surprise, I have homoromantic feelings for you! It's a great laugh, isn't it?" The words fly out, cutting, and Jug can only desperately brace himself for the blow. When Archie doesn't immediately react, he barrels on relentlessly. "Just laugh and reject me, so we can awkwardly leave and pretend I didn't write soppy poetry about you all the sooner." Just hit me, he thinks through the white noise in his head. Just get it over with.

Archie looks at Jug and the notebook in his hands, which have traitorously started to shake. He steps closer and Jug didn't think Archie would actually hit him if he found out but whatever gets this over with quickly so he can hide under his bed for the rest of the weekend-

Archie takes another step. He's close, and his eyes are warm and bottomless in the light from the streets outside. He kisses the tip of Jughead's nose.

Jug can't compute that. 

It must show, because Archie smiles and ducks his head.

"You wrote me poetry," He says, as if that explains it.

Jug breathes. Dream or reality or alternate reality, he knows what he wants to do.

Carefully, slowly, Jug drops one hand from his notebook. Archie keeps looking at him steadily and Jug doesn't look away. He reaches out. Their fingers touch and tangle.

"Okay," Says Jughead, the hazy light holding the world at bay, his tired old soul in one hand and something new and precious in the other. "Okay."


End file.
